Would Bernie have won?

@Robert Gentel,

I'm not convinced he would have, but I'm also not convinced at this point that he wouldn't have, from the energy shown by him and his followers. I was for him for quite a while over Hillary Clinton, but somewhere in the middle of all this, I got chary if he could actually have ability to go forward in the presidency, with varied kinds of competence. I dithered some weeks or months and switched to Clinton.

I never figured out Trump and still haven't. I've considered him as a playmaker as in show business, and, the opposite, considered him serious.
The hard to believe part, for me, was that all the obnoxious things he said had no bearing on his popularity, leaving me and many of us confused.

I'm an older white woman, not one of the 53%, with disabilities I'm used to, very low income from my social security. I don't understand the number of "poor" white women voting for him, except for the old obey your spouse thing.
I'm not complaining, I've been involved in many useful projects over time; just never a money hound back in the day.

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@Foofie,

Quote:

Trump just woke up a demographic that in the past ignored many elections.

Bernie may have done the same..in fact its postulated that many Bernie supporters didn't vote for Hillary or didn't vote at all which **could have** made a difference..

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@Robert Gentel,

It is an interesting question but one that can't seriously be answered.

Sanders didn't continue his campaign in opposition to Trump.

He didn't debate Trump

He wasn't under the scrutiny of the press the way Trump and Clinton were

We have no idea of what gaffes he may have committed along the way.

I understand why his supporters want to believe he would have beaten Trump (although the notion that he would have done so in a landslide is just ridiculous), but there are far too many variables in which he didn't participate to make any reasonable call.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

It is an interesting question but one that can't seriously be answered.

Sanders didn't continue his campaign in opposition to Trump.

He didn't debate Trump

He wasn't under the scrutiny of the press the way Trump and Clinton were

We have no idea of what gaffes he may have committed along the way.

I understand why his supporters want to believe he would have beaten Trump (although the notion that he would have done so in a landslide is just ridiculous), but there are far too many variables in which he didn't participate to make any reasonable call.

The thing is even if Bernie made gaffs he still wouldnt have had all the darkness of his past to deal with like Hillary. The Dem party wouldnt have been as devided after the nomination. Many felt the DNC did shady things to make sure Hillary got the nomination. They turned against their own supporters. At the convention, Bernie supporters were treated like criminals. This doesnt sit well if you then demand them to back Hillary.

Trump didnt have this problem to deal with but the groping stories were uneffective because it's not shocking that a man groped women. We have known this type of behavior is common so no shock there. But the damage the DNC created was highlighting corruption and disloyalty to their own people.

For all that I think Bernie would have been able to put pressure on Trump for policies instead of damage control like Hillary and wikileaks or the FBI investigations.

Bernie woyld have rallied a unified Dem party instead of a split one.

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@Krumple,

That may be but we can't say with anything close to certainty how he would have fared.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

That may be but we can't say with anything close to certainty how he would have fared.

If there are infinite realities, Bernie won in some. You just are not lucky enough to be in one of those realities.

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@catbeasy,

catbeasy wrote:

Quote:
Trump just woke up a demographic that in the past ignored many elections.

Bernie may have done the same..in fact its postulated that many Bernie supporters didn't vote for Hillary or didn't vote at all which **could have** made a difference..

I don't understand. Essentially the same number of people who voted for the Republican candidate in 2008 and 2012 voted for the Republican candidate in 2016. There has been no surge or wake-up call in the "demographic" that votes Republican. It was the Democratic Party that lost millions of voters/supporters since 2008. Bernie could have captured those lost voters. It is clear that Hillary / DNC establishment could not.

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@Krumple,

I guess so, but I would say I'm the lucky one.

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@Debra Law,

Quote:

Trump just woke up a demographic that in the past ignored many elections

Quote:

Essentially the same number of people who voted for the Republican candidate in 2008 and 2012 voted for the Republican candidate in 2016

I'm not sure. The narrative that I (think!) I'm hearing is that the polls had Hillary winning because they were not counting a whole bunch of people who ended up voting for Trump.

What you are saying is that it wasn't that. It was that the number of democrats expected to vote, didn't vote. Or perhaps the number of republican votes were down (or stayed the same) and folks who normally vote democrat voted republican? Certainly some states that went to Obama, went to Trump this time around..

Anyone got any hard numbers to support what happened on this?

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@Debra Law,

Debra Law wrote:

I don't understand. Essentially the same number of people who voted for the Republican candidate in 2008 and 2012 voted for the Republican candidate in 2016. There has been no surge or wake-up call in the "demographic" that votes Republican. It was the Democratic Party that lost millions of voters/supporters since 2008. Bernie could have captured those lost voters. It is clear that Hillary / DNC establishment could not.

Political Science mavens will be debating this for months and maybe even years to come.

I don't have a solid grasp of the all the numbers, but if the number of people who voted for the Republican in 2016 is essentially the same as the numbers doing so in 2008 and 2012 it would seem that the Republican base didn't grow, but isn't it conceivable that the base remained the same in overall number but by a combination of a loss of traditional Republicans and a gain in first time voters ("the demographic that in the past ignored many elections" rather than young people) and defecting Democrats?

If it's the case then the significance would be that Trump's performance in his first term could retain the "new comers" and regain the "old timers" and thus be in an excellent position for re-election in 2020, or, of course, send the party spiraling by losing the new Republicans and driving the old ones further away.

Are there reliable numbers for how many #NeverTrumpers voted Libertarian or stayed home?

In the end, if he manages to revitalize the economy, give Americans the sense that the US has a firmer handle on world affairs then it seems to currently and reduces the level of swamp water in DC (no one but a totalitarian could ever drain the DC swamp and whether or not Trump would like to have dictatorial power, he won't get it) - and all without getting us into a war - then the country will at least seem to be headed in the right direction and he could win over not only Republicans who didn't vote for him, but Independents and Democrats too.

Certainly there will be die-hard partisans and ideologues who would choke to death voting for Trump, but despite the effort of his opposition to make it seem like it, not everyone who voted for Clinton or against him thinks he's a monster. When times are good, a lot of people don't want to question why they are, they just want them to keep on rolling.

Of course it won't be easy for him to achieve such a level of success, but it never is for any elected or re-elected president. Few on the Left had any expectation that Reagan would have that level of achievement, but Mondale was, never-the-less, crushed and humiliated when he sought to deny Reagan a second term.

Now, I know those on the Left insist that Reagan didn't actually achieve substantive success, even if that were the case (and it's not) Americans all believed he had.

Trump isn't Reagan and the world is different than it was then, but it's still possible (especially with "control" of all three branches of government) that he can match Reagan's achievements and in 2020 demographics will matter less than they seem to today.

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Maybe Bernie would have won, but probably not. But I think Biden would have wiped the floor with Trump, except he chickened out. He didn't want to buck the party machine's choice for nominee.

I'll give the Republican party one thing: at least they had a primary. Maybe next time the Democratic party will have a primary.

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I don't think Bernie would have won. Once people got word of how much of their incomes Bernie was willing to piss away in some socialist dream, they would have been against him. There is no way the average American was going to be ok with the amount of tax increases he wanted to completely change the US way of life. Obama already tried to "fundamentally change" America and we can see how his socialist idea's went, as limited as they were.

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@coluber2001,

I had a few happy days when I thought Biden would go for it. Aside from being a Democrat and being just as political as anyone, I really thought he was concerned about the best interests of the country. I did think he could have beaten Trump, but heck, I thought anyone could beat Trump. I have been wrong before.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

if the number of people who voted for the Republican in 2016 is essentially the same as the numbers doing so in 2008 and 2012 it would seem that the Republican base didn't grow, but isn't it conceivable that the base remained the same in overall number but by a combination of a loss of traditional Republicans and a gain in first time voters ("the demographic that in the past ignored many elections" rather than young people) and defecting Democrats?

That makes sense to me. It's also what Trump's vote totals by state suggest.

Nationwide, it's true, Trump didn't win more voters than Romney. Right now, he's at 60.9 million (because they're still counting votes). That happens to be exactly what Romney got too. Trump's about 30 thousand ahead.

But that overall result cloaks significant regional differences.

There were states where Trump got many fewer votes than Romney. #NeverTrumpers, maybe. Who stayed home, skipped the top line of the ballot, or switched to Hillary (or Johnson, or McMullin).

But there were also states where Trump got significantly more votes than Romney. And not because they're states particularly known for their healthy population growth.

Those must have either been Obama > Trump voters, or people who hadn't been voting previously/for a while but were activated by Trump's dog whistles.

Vote totals were hard to assess on election night because so many votes (esp mail-in ballots and the like, especially in the West) aren't counted on the night itself. But there's a running tally of the counted vote by state in this spreadsheet.

I created my own spreadsheet to put those numbers next to the raw numbers by state in 2012 (don't ask why. We're all mad in our own ways).

These are the biggest outliers in terms of how many votes Trump gained/lost compared to Romney:

Code:

1. +452,463 Florida 

2. +232,507 Pennsylvania

3. +163,946 Michigan

4. +149,563 New York

5. +135,579 Indiana



46. -66,084 Maryland

47. -105,793 Massachusetts

48. -201,041 Washington

49. -321,569 Utah

50. -1,487,403 California

California's number is overly low because they still haven't finished counting there. As of yesterday, for example, they still needed to count one-third of the votes in Marin county. In this year's Democratic primary it took them a month to finish counting. I don't know if there are other states where they still have so much to count as well. Washington and Oregon are all vote-by-mail, so maybe.

Lot of big states there obviously because they have the most voters. You could also calculate it as a relative measure, i.e. Trump's number of votes is what percentage of Romney's number of votes?

Code:

1. 116.4% West Virginia	

2. 114.8% North Dakota	

3. 114.6% Maine	

4. 114.1% Rhode Island	

5. 111.9% Delaware	



46. 91.1% Massachusetts	

47. 84.4% Washington	

48. 79.2% Alaska	

49. 69.3% California	

50. 56.6% Utah

Some unsurprising names here. Trump doing particularly well in West-Virginia won't surprise many, considering how well he's done generally with white working class voters and how quickly WV has been turning dark red. Trump doing particularly well in North Dakota may have a lot to do with the many new inhabitants there who came for the oil boom. Trump's overperformance in some of northeastern states may seem surprising, but was actually foreseen by those oh-so-maligned polls.

Trump doing very badly in Utah, in relative terms, won't surprise anyone (Mormons). Liberal/coastal states Massachusetts, California and Washington are also unsurprising, and Alaska more surprising, but keep in mind again that some states might not have finished counting.

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Being a Trump fan, I am super happy Bernie didn't get the chance here. I really think Bernie would have kicked trumps ass. A lot independent voters jumped on the screw the establishment train and Bernie could have definitely drained some of that energy from trump. Bernie also didn't have a lot of dirt on him like Hillary had so he wouldn't have had to worry about "C stands for classified". Obama still would have backed him, and he even had some of the same ideas trump had minus the ever unpopular wall idea and plus "free college for everyone ".

I'm almost ALWAYS a conservative, but if Bernie was up against anyone but Trump, I would have voted Democrat just to see what happened.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

On one hand he prevailed against Hillary precisely in some of the states that she did most poorly in against Trump

Just looking at the swing states which Hillary ended up losing because her margin was more than just a couple of points worse than Obama in 2012, there are two which Bernie won in the primaries: Wisconsin and (narrowly) Michigan. But there are three where Hillary actually won the primaries: Pennsylvania, Ohio and (narrowly) Iowa.

So, if anything, that would just underline how little correlation there can be in how someone performs in the general vs in the primary.

You could throw in states that ended up uncomfortably close because Hillary's margin was more than 4 points worse than Obama's, though: Maine, Minnesota and New Hampshire. Bernie won all of those - so, all-right.

Considering that Bernie campaigned for Hillary over and again in the Midwest, rather than anywhere else -- and that kind of stuff is likely carefully coordinated by the campaign -- I suppose the Hillary campaign also thought he was particularly effective there.

But it's still kind of problematic to extrapolate too much from primary results. Not only because of the argument that Bernie never got to face the GOP attack machine, and we have no idea how a Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders would have fared under that. But also just because relatively few people take part in many primaries, and certainly in caucuses. And those who do are probably unrepresentative of the rest of the voters in their states, politically and demographically.

I looked it up:

In New Hampshire (which Bernie easily won), an impressive 25% of all eligible voters took part in the Democratic primary.
In Wisconsin (which Bernie easily won), 24% did so.
In Pennsylvania (which Hillary easily won), 17%
In Michigan (which Bernie narrowly won), 16%
In Ohio (which Hillary easily won), 14%
In Minnesota (which Bernie easily won), 5%
In Maine (which Bernie easily won), 4%.

Quote:

On the other hand he was a "socialist" (though not sure if that matters if a pussy-grabbing guy with no experience, no tact, and breaking all kinds of "requirements" like releasing tax returns can win) but that was about all the baggage he had, there were no email surprises to work with either.

Well...

THE MYTHS DEMOCRATS SWALLOWED THAT COST THEM THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Quote:

2. The Myth That Sanders Would Have Won Against Trump

[..] I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. [..] Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion [..].

Could Sanders still have won? Well, Trump won, so anything is possible. But Sanders supporters puffing up their chests as they arrogantly declare Trump would have definitely lost against their candidate deserve to be ignored.

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@nimh,

It's definitely true that Bernie is not some messiah candidate and has his own flaws but the baggage I refer to is that Hillary was someone who before the campaign even started was already one of the most hated liberals around. Bernie would have gotten more of that if he won the nomination, of course, but I really do think that the Democrats nominated the one candidate that Trump could beat.

Not because she is so fatally flawed as her critics make her out to be, but because she is the perfect foil to the anti-establishment wave Trump rode. Bernie was riding that wave as well, and I think he would have undercut a lot of that sentiment from Trump, dividing some of that vote.

He was also not a minority and there was definitely some component of the vote that was pushback against the increasing power of minorities in American culture.

This isn't something I think I can assert to be right or even try to use polls to predict. The difference between winning and loosing this election is within the margin of errors for polling and the biggest consistency I have seen this season for polling is that it, along with me and everyone else, seems to underestimate the degree to which people wish for the repudiation of the establishment that we saw.

I'm not sure that Bernie would have won but I do think that literally anyone other than Hillary would have been a worse foil for a Trump victory. Not because she is such a "nasty woman" or anything, just the optics play perfectly given the "getting away with the emails" thing and her being the ultimate political insider.

I take it that you don't see it this way though, and do not think Bernie would have won? Or at least do not think he would have been better than Hillary.

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@Robert Gentel,

You could be right, but I am not so sure. Trump might have played it differently with Bernie than he did with Hillary. He might have played up about how much everything Sanders was advocating for was going to cost the tax payers. He might have tried to paint Bernie as a played out old hippie wanting to give everybody a free ride in this country on the backs up those who make it on their own.

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@skirby,

skirby wrote:

You could be right, but I am not so sure. Trump might have played it differently with Bernie than he did with Hillary. He might have played up about how much everything Sanders was advocating for was going to cost the tax payers.

Coming from a guy who wants to build a border wall that wouldn't have worked too well IMO. The economic part of the debate (the decreasing economic power of the blue collar American worker that is inevitable due to globalization) would have been interesting to see play out. Not sure how that would have worked against each other.

Quote:

He might have tried to paint Bernie as a played out old hippie wanting to give everybody a free ride in this country on the backs up those who make it on their own.

He probably would, not sure how well it would have worked. Bernie has a different brand of populism but it resonated with a lot of the same "disenfranchised" demographics.

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@skirby,

Isn't that exactly what Bernie was doing though? If you were successful then you screwed someone else, so there for we have to raise taxes on the actual taxpayers to that someone else can get theirs? Are you saying he wouldn't have tried to usher in the biggest era of wealth redistribution in US history?

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Would Bernie have won?

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